Mike McKee of Ataccama On How To Leverage Data To Take Your Company To The Next Level

The amount of data we are generating daily is only going to increase over time. One thing organizations can be sure of is that their competitors will be mining their own data to accelerate their business outcomes. The data strategy of any company today will tell you a lot about how successful they will be in moving to AI and driving any data-driven projects in the future.

The proper use of Data — data about team performance, data about customers, or data about the competition, can be a sort of force multiplier. It has the potential to dramatically help a business to scale. But sadly, many businesses have data but don’t know how how to properly leverage it. What exactly is useful data? How can you properly utilize data? How can data help a business grow? To address this, we are talking to business leaders who can share stories from their experience about “How To Effectively Leverage Data To Take Your Company To The Next Level”. As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Mike McKee.

Mike McKee is the CEO of Ataccama, a leading provider of AI-powered data management solutions specializing in data quality, data governance, and master data management. With nearly three decades of senior leadership experience and startup expertise, Mike has a proven track record of driving success in high-growth technology companies, including PTC, Rapid7, ObserveIT, Proofpoint, and most recently, Dotmatics. Mike is passionate about building high-performing teams and brings huge energy to every role. He believes that nurturing trust within organizations creates a great place to work, strong business growth, and satisfied customers and stakeholders.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

I was a serious ice hockey player in school and worked in a pizzeria to pay my fees. After graduating from Princeton, I joined the NHL as a defender for the Quebec Nordiques in the 1993–94 season. But then I got hurt. After my third concussion, I got back on the ice and I suddenly missed the puck with my stick. I’d done that move a million times before and this time, I completely missed it. The doctor was really honest with me and said I should quit. It was so hard, but I realized I had to put my health first.

My first job after hockey was in banking at Goldman Sachs. I would sit at the table and talk to companies about their business stories and passions, and help them raise money. After two years, I realized that I really wanted to be sitting on the other side of the table. So, I went to Harvard Business School and got lots of exposure to businesses — mostly startups — and I then made the move from finance to tech.

It has been said that sometimes our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about a humorous mistake you made when you were first starting and the lesson you learned from that?

It wasn’t that humorous at the time, but I thought I handled my first board meeting really well only to get completely the opposite feedback from the Chairman afterwards! I had walked through the state of the business in a good amount of detail and then spent the last half of the meeting presenting the four of five biggest challenges to the business. It’s important to me that people feel their opinions are valued, so I asked the board how they thought we should tackle those challenges.

The discussion, however, wasn’t nearly as robust as I had hoped, but I still felt really good about the meeting and walked back to our offices with a hop in my step. Then the Chairman called me and I vividly remember standing in the lobby of our building while he chastised me for over an hour! In a nutshell, he said that the CEO is the one in charge and should tell the Board the plan to tackle the challenges, and their job was to react to the plan. Today, it amuses me how much I misread the situation, but I still keep this important leadership advice in mind every day.

Leadership often entails making difficult decisions or hard choices between two apparently good paths. Can you share a story with us about a hard decision or choice you had to make as a leader?

In one of my early roles, I joined a startup where the founder had done an amazing job of getting the company off the ground and getting it to a really successful place. However, as we looked to scale, it became clear that the founder’s skill set was more suited to the initial stage of the company rather than the next stage of growth. That was a hard lesson to learn — that someone so enmeshed in the history of the business is not necessarily the right person to drive future product development.

I was under a lot of pressure from investors to ensure my decision was sound, especially as I was new to the company at the time. Time and cash constraints meant we couldn’t afford to risk taking the product in the wrong direction. Ultimately, I made the difficult call to have that conversation with the founder, which was hard for me as a leader and hard for the founder, who decided to leave the company in the end. It was a challenging experience, but it underscored the importance of aligning leadership capabilities with the company’s current needs. Every leader must honestly assess if they are the right person for the company’s stage and be open to making a change if the answer is no.

Are you working on any new, exciting projects now? How do you think that might help people?

Like many of our customers, AI is our focus. We’re working on several projects involving AI, both internally and in our products, to help our customers leverage their data for their own AI strategies.

It’s early days, but the potential applications of AI are vast and exciting. It could be easy to ignore or hide from AI because there are so many potential use cases. However, given its significant potential impact, we are committed to exploring and integrating AI into our processes and offerings. This journey is essential for our growth and for empowering our customers to make the most of their data.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

I actually have four traits that have been important in my career:

1. Being unafraid to say ‘I don’t know’. When I first became a CEO, people were asking what the plan was and I didn’t know as I had just started. I had ideas, of course. I knew the company had potential but I didn’t know the long-term plan. I called an executive coach, Brad Spencer, and discussed it with him and he advised me to be honest and admit that I didn’t immediately know but that I would develop a plan. This approach created a culture of openness and honesty, which I continued to instill in all my roles.
2. Being yourself. I love building businesses and teams and making customers happy, so it’s easy to be authentic. The more you’re able to relate to people, the easier it is to build relationships with those people. I also welcome feedback on my style to ensure I am strengthening those relationships with my teams. Feedback truly is a gift.
3. Helping managers get their teams to where they want to go. I believe the majority of people don’t get real feedback in the workplace. One of our values at Ataccama is ‘candid and caring,” which is about the notion of radical candor. If you care about someone, you should be honest with them. People tell me I bring energy into the environment because building a business, going to different offices, achieving success, and meeting different teams excite me, and I want to share that enthusiasm with my teams.
4. Helping enterprises be customer-centric. For a company to thrive, it needs to have a good culture and open environment where people care about each other. Beyond that, it comes down to customer success. The best way to get new customers is to make existing customers happy. Happy customers are the best advocates. It’s the best way to grow a business, and it’s equally important that if someone gives you money, you should give them value in return. Having a value-focused mindset will dramatically increase your chances of winning and sustaining that success.

Thank you for all that. Let’s now turn to the main focus of our discussion about empowering organizations to be more “data-driven.” For the benefit of our readers, can you help explain what it looks like to use data to make decisions?

Being data-driven is about 30% having the data and 70% knowing how to use it. businesses should be looking to maximize their data. It’s about building a mindset that data should be used in every activity. This requires a high level of maturity and developing this capability over time. People need to learn how to use data effectively and how to read the numbers accurately to gain the right insights to identify opportunities and troubleshoot when needed.

For example, businesses can use it to better serve their customers by providing new offers and new ways to interact. It can also shed light on potential product or proposition innovations. Data allows businesses to see how customers are using their products and identify whether they are inactive or could benefit more from a different product or service, or even add more products. Understanding your target customer starts with knowing about the customers who are currently using your product or service, and building on that.

Based on your experience, which companies can most benefit from tools that empower data collaboration?

Every company can benefit. All companies have data and while the specific use cases may vary, there are generally shared challenges such as meeting compliance requirements and delivering great customer service.

Take the tech companies like Google, Meta, and Amazon that use data well and enable data collaboration. For them, it’s completely natural and as a result, they are thriving. To stay competitive in the modern age, all other companies will have to adopt similar practices now.

We see customers needing to bring together multiple data sets, whether due to legacy data spread across different parts of the business or following an acquisition or merger. Others are focused on ensuring data privacy and protection, so they need to know which data contains PII to avoid leakage or breach. Some may be seeking to improve customer service through targeted marketing or external chatbots.

The beauty of data is that it can fuel business in myriad ways, but you need to be confident your data is accurate and trustworthy before you apply it in decision-making.

Can you share some examples of how data analytics and data collaboration can help to improve operations, processes, and customer experiences? We’d love to hear some stories if possible.

• Growing market share to drive revenue
• Expanding their customer footprint by discovering cross-sell and upsell opportunities to improve customer lifetime value
• Reducing costs and increasing efficiency by modernizing technology
• Mitigating regulatory and security risk

Every company is looking to grow revenue and maintain success and will have their own specific business initiatives aimed at increasing their market share and protecting their reputation. They might do this through segmentation and targeting marketing to expand their customer footprint, increase their customer base through geographic expansion or new product development, or reduce costs by modernizing their technology.

In working with them, we have been able to calculate that having a strong data management strategy can drive a thirty to fifty-50 percent increase in productivity, reduce the risk of penalties, fraud, and data breaches two to four times, cut technology spend by between 10 and 25 percent, and boost revenue by two to eight percent from core business initiatives. For the ambitious business, managing your data properly is a shortcut to success.

From your vantage point, has the shift toward becoming more data-driven been challenging for some teams or organizations? What are the challenges? How can organizations solve these challenges?

One of the primary challenges for organizations becoming more data-driven is connecting technical and business teams effectively. This is not a new issue, but many companies have not yet addressed it successfully.

Data teams are often focused on building data governance foundations and setting up various tools and processes to help their organization. However, the business teams may find the data they are getting is too technical, not of the right quality, or not in the right format. Additionally, the data team may not understand the business context of the request and therefore what data is required, and this well-intentioned misalignment is a huge challenge for organizations to overcome.

As a result, companies end up with data teams doing their best to build robust data governance systems, but business teams remain unsatisfied and underutilize the data. Data teams must create business value and reestablish their position within the organization, with Chief Data Officers (CDOs) or Chief Data and Artificial Intelligence Officers (CDAOs) being the main stakeholders.

The solution is complex and multifaceted, but one recurring blocker is data quality. Business users need solutions that allow them to work with data independently — changing formats, enriching it, and resolving issues automatically through smart algorithms. Data quality acts as the bridge between technical and business teams, enabling effective collaboration and maximizing the value derived from data.

Ok. Thank you. Here is the primary question of our discussion. Based on your experience and success, what are “Five Ways a Company Can Effectively Leverage Data to Take It To The Next Level”? Please share a story or an example for each.

Quality, trustworthy data helps companies overcome business challenges and identify opportunities to grow the business through a number of different channels.

1. Enable regulatory compliance: T-Mobile used our platform to build a robust data classification solution, allowing them to scan large volumes of data and quickly identify sensitive or PII data for regulatory management. Similarly, Raiffeisen Bank used data quality measures to consolidate 5.7 million customer records to comply with GDPR.
2. Inform M&A strategy: Teranet worked with us to implement proactive data governance and data quality processes, protecting and securing sensitive internal and external data. This empowered the leadership team to make better M&A decisions, among other benefits, as the team could provide data-related capabilities to support due diligence, data integration, and compliance.
3. Customer 360: Many companies struggle to map their data landscape and extract usable insights. Insurance leader iA, after several acquisitions, used our products to move from a siloed data approach to a single source of truth for customer records, enabling them to unlock further growth for their business.
4. Effective reporting: We helped Fifth Third Bank improve communication between the lines of business and product owners across multiple domains to ensure data management objectives were aligned with business objectives. Our reporting and visualization capabilities enabled the bank to tell its data story effectively, providing stakeholders with clear insights into data quality metrics for informed decision-making.
5. Enhance marketing strategy: KB Bank, part of Société Générale, wanted to build a customer data integration hub to replace their existing data management system. The data integration included 12 million addresses, 12 million parties, 5 reference sources, and 17 source systems. The resulting accurate, real-time customer master data enabled the marketing team to offer loans to households, groups, and individuals.

Based on your experience, how do you think the needs for data might evolve and change over the next five years?

AI is definitely the latest hype, but it is driving a heightened awareness of data and data quality that we haven’t previously seen. Companies moving to automation will require high-quality data. If they haven’t already started the process, they will have it in their short-term strategy for sure.

The amount of data we are generating daily is only going to increase over time. One thing organizations can be sure of is that their competitors will be mining their own data to accelerate their business outcomes. The data strategy of any company today will tell you a lot about how successful they will be in moving to AI and driving any data-driven projects in the future.

AI will fundamentally transform how companies operate. Those who don’t adopt AI will struggle to compete and may not survive. This shift will also revolutionize the workforce, blending technical and business roles. Similar to how industrialization transformed manual workers into machine operators, knowledge workers will need technical and data management skills to manage AI-enabled processes.

Data management will be critical for this future. The role of the Chief Data Officer (CDO) will become strategically important, growing massively and integrating deeply into critical business processes. Companies must develop robust data management strategies to handle increased complexity and ensure trusted data is available for business use. This is where we come in, helping businesses manage complexity and maximize their data potential.

Thank you for your great insights, We are nearly done. You are a person of significant influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?

Business has evolved to recognize its role in the wider community. In addition to growing a brand culture through their own people and values, companies have a role to play in establishing and upholding important social interests externally. We need to think about creating a culture that goes beyond just driving a return for investment for the money. We need to give people a good place to learn and grow while providing great service to our customers, and also participating in our community and the environment, recognizing where we can contribute to improving the world around us.

How can our readers further follow your work?

Keep an eye on our website for the latest updates on our customers, products, and company news, or subscribe to our newsletter.

Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!